What Makes an Infographic Cool?

I’m very excited about this project! This week I’m going to start sharing a weekly guest post series from prominent infographics designers about “What makes an infographic design cool?” Each Wednesday, I’ll feature a different expert opinion (until I run out of experts). I’ve invited these experts to draft their own posts, and share whatever examples they want to highlight.

I’ve been running the Cool Infographics site since 2007, and we have watched an amazing category of design being developed. They didn’t exist when I started, but now we have an infographics design industry, and a number of well known infographics design experts. The practice of visual storytelling has become a recognized design profession.

I receive around 30-50 infographic submissions to the site every day, and most of them don’t make the cut to be considered a “cool infographic” to be posted. The process of filtering these designs is very time consuming, and my current backlog is up to at least 400 unread submissions. Over the years, we have developed our own formula for filtering the infographic designs you see posted on the site, but I really wanted to hear and learn from other experts about what they consider to be “cool.”

Stay tuned, and let me know what you think of the series in the comments.